Energy-efficient automatic location-triggered applications on smartphones

Journal article, 2014

With the prevalence of localization techniques in smartphones, location-based applications on mobiles have become increasingly popular. However, only minorities of applications can be triggered automatically by the predefined locations of interest without any human interaction. One reason is that the inevitable operation of location detection by GPS is power-intensive. While existing work has focused on energy efficiency in continuous location tracking, energy-efficient location detection for matching predefined location of interest remains to be further explored. This paper proposes a unified framework that supports energy-efficient location detection for automatic location-triggered applications. Our framework triggers desired events only when the user is approaching the predefined locations of interest. Besides the efforts we make to reduce the number of GPS updates by cooperating with other types of on-device sensors, the framework also aims to coordinate multiple location-triggered applications to further reduce energy consumption on location updates. We implemented our framework as a middleware in the Android operating system and conducted extensive real experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that our framework can reduce the number of GPS requests and low the energy consumption of the smartphones significantly.